Acts of Desire

Women and Sex on Stage 1800-1930

Sos Eltis

Draws on a wealth of archival material, including unpublished plays, contemporary reviews, and censorship records, presenting some material for the first time

Sheds light on the often overlooked role of the theatre in the history of nineteenth-century sexuality and literature

Challenges the currency and validity of the long-established critical term 'the fallen woman'

Reveals the connections and cross-influences between nineteenth-century theatre, visual arts and the novel

Acts of Desire

Women and Sex on Stage 1800-1930

Sos Eltis

Description

From seduced maidens to adulterous wives, bigamists, courtesans, kept women and streetwalkers, the so-called 'fallen woman' was a ubiquitous and enduring figure on the Victorian and Edwardian stage. Acts of Desire traces the theatrical representation of illicit female sexuality from early nineteenth-century melodramas, through sensation dramas, Ibsenite sex-problem plays and suffrage dramas, to early social realism and the well-made plays of Pinero, Jones, Maugham, and Coward. This study reveals and analyses enduring plot lines and tropes that continue to influence contemporary theatre and film. Women's illicit desires became a theatrical focus for anxieties and debates surrounding gender roles, women's rights, sexual morality, class conflict, economics, eugenics,
and female employment. The theatre played a central role in both establishing and challenging sexual norms, and many playwrights exploited the ambiguities and implications of performance to stage disruptive spectacles of female desire, agency, energy, and resourcefulness, using ingenuity and skill to evade the control of that ever watchful state censor, the Lord Chamberlain.

Covering an astonishing range of theatrical, social, literary, and political texts, this study challenges the currency and validity of the long-established critical term 'the fallen woman', and establishes the centrality of the theatre to cultural and sexual debates throughout the period. Acts of Desire encompasses published and unpublished plays, archival material, censorship records, and contemporary
reviews to reveal the surprising continuities, complex debates, covert meanings, and exuberant spectacles which marked the history of theatrical representations of female sexuality. Engaging with popular and 'high art' performances, this study also reveals the vital connections between theatre and its sister arts, tracing the exchange of influences between Victorian drama, narrative painting and the novel, and showing theatre to be a crucial but neglected element in the cultural history of women's sexuality.

Acts of Desire

Women and Sex on Stage 1800-1930

Sos Eltis

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Seduced Maidens and Resourceful Maids2. Bigamy and Sensation3. English Decency and French Immorality4. Sex Problems and Nature's Law5. Workers and Wages6. Rewriting the PastAfterwords

Acts of Desire

Women and Sex on Stage 1800-1930

Sos Eltis

Author Information

Sos Eltis is a Fellow and Tutor at Brasenose College, Oxford University. She is the author of Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (OUP, 1996), and of a range of articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century drama, gothic fiction, and Oscar Wilde. She taught at St John's College, Oxford, and at Boston University, Massachusetts, before being appointed Fellow in English at Brasenose College in 1997.